ataxiwardance

letterstomycountry:

squashed replied to your post: Personal Notes: On Reading Cases

And when it’s a Thomas opinion, I close the book. Because Thomas’s opinions are written terribly. Scalia was at least witty.

Thomas is horrible 99% of the time. But he is actually fairly lucid when he’s writing…

I’m not going to address Affirmative Action on the whole as theory or practice but I am sympathetic to your unease in finding yourself nodding along to Justice Thomas. I had the similar and unfortunate experience last week while reviewing my Con Law readings. His Grutter dissent is actually a stirring revival of the important and beautiful colorblind interpretation the Equal Protection Clause as well as a reality check on how lax the Court can be with the second prong of the Strict Scrutiny inquiry. I admit, I felt fairly strange telling a friend after class that I was both the President of my law school’s ACLU and (temporarily) in agreeance with Justice Thomas.

Shudder.

Thankfully this sympathy for the (originalist) devil(s) didn’t last too long. This morning I draw caricatures of Scalia sobbing like a baby in the margins of his particularly histrionic United States v. Virginia (1996) dissent.       D:    < Scalia

Anywho, relevant news is relevant: New York Times - Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Affirmative Action Case

darkjez:

The damage this SC has been inflicting will be felt for decades to come. Our Civil Rights are being eroded people—wake up!

“In 1985, John Thompson was convicted of murder in Louisiana. Having already been convicted in a separate armed robbery case, he opted not to testify on his own behalf in his murder trial. He was sentenced to death and spent 18 years in prison—14 of them isolated on death row—and watched as seven executions were planned for him. Several weeks before an execution scheduled for May 1999, Thompson’s private investigators learned that prosecutors had failed to turn over evidence that would have cleared him at his robbery trial. This evidence included the fact that the main informant against him had received a reward from the victim’s family, that the eyewitness identification done at the time described someone who looked nothing like him, and that a blood sample taken from the crime scene did not match Thompson’s blood type.

In 1963, in Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must turn over to the defense any evidence that would tend to prove a defendant’s innocence. Failure to do so is a violation of the defendant’s constitutional rights. Yet the four prosecutors in Thompson’s case managed to keep secret the fact that they had hidden exculpatory evidence for 20 years. Were it not for Thompson’s investigators, he would have been executed for a murder he did not commit.

Both of Thompson’s convictions were overturned. When he was retried on the murder charges, a jury acquitted him after 35 minutes. He sued the former Louisiana district attorney for Orleans Parish, Harry Connick Sr. (yes, his dad) for failing to train his prosecutors about their legal obligation to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense. A jury awarded Thompson $14 million for this civil rights violation, one for every year he spent wrongfully incarcerated. The district court judge added another $1 million in attorneys’ fees. A panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict. An equally divided 5th Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed again.

But this week, writing on behalf of the five conservatives on the Supreme Court and in his first majority opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas tossed out the verdict, finding that the district attorney can’t be responsible for the single act of a lone prosecutor. The Thomas opinion is an extraordinary piece of workmanship, matched only by Justice Antonin Scalia’s concurring opinion, in which he takes a few extra whacks at Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent. (Ginsburg was so bothered by the majority decision that she read her dissent from the bench for the first time this term.) Both Thomas and Scalia have produced what can only be described as a master class in human apathy. Their disregard for the facts of Thompson’s thrashed life and near-death emerges as a moral flat line. Scalia opens his concurrence with a swipe at Ginsburg’s “lengthy excavation of the trial record” and states that “the question presented for our review is whether a municipality is liable for a single Brady violation by one of its prosecutors.” But only by willfully ignoring that entire trial record can he and Thomas reduce the entire constitutional question to a single misdeed by a single bad actor…”  [READ MORE]

Nice to see Justice Thomas occasionally wake from his slumber on the bench to deny recovery to a man falsely imprisoned for 18 years.

Great work out there Justice Thomas. Aces.